December 17, 2007

Creative thinking in conflict resolution

I like thinking frameworks. Even though they sound restrictive, I’ve found that in fact, they often help to generate more innovative ideas than the free-form brainstorming. In his article “The Joke Model of Creative Thinking” at Mediate.com, John Cooley shows how the structure and formulas used to create a joke can be applied in conflict resolution:

It is the quality and the timing of the punchline that comprise the creative act and speeds the joke to a satisfying resolution. It is this same kind of punchline -- specially selected new information -- that must be injected into the mediation process at the appropriate time in order to yield highly satisfactory, optimal, or even super-optimal, solutions. A point deserving special emphasis, which may indeed serve as the punchline of this article, is as follows: It is the mental process which occurs in joke processing in a microsecond--at the time of and just before surprise--that must be replicated in the mediation setting in order to achieve super-optimum solutions; it is as if that mental process of reframing be viewed under a microscope and in slow-motion to be effectively discerned and applied.

The substantive steps of reframing in the joke process may be replicated in mediation on a gross scale and at a cosmically decelerated rate of speed. Two questions present themselves: First, what are punchlines in mediation? And second, at what stage of the mediation process should they be introduced?

The essence of strategy lies in creating tomorrow's competitive advantages faster than anyone can mimic today's. To accomplish this feat consistently, you must embrace innovation as a core competency. Core competencies are different for every person and occupation. Yet the one common core competency, the one we all need to make count, is innovation.